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Dust on My Shoes

Like Peter Pinney, you go adventuring, in this ABC/AFC online documentary, into sunburnt lands, from Greece to Burma, but it’s our 2007, rather than his 1949, and it’s travel with the fingertips; your boots are clean. A typewriter spells it out, you’re delving into the past here, with a quote from Mark Twain—"travel is fatal to prejudice"—whose despatches have always bridged the gap between then and now. You are offered a series of journeys, strangely linear in this netscape; they don’t quite fit. You want to be led and lost but there are limited options so you go musical. You enter Greece at the Lucifer Taverna and bask in the sunlit tones of Kavisha Mazzella and Mick Thomas. You travel through Iran, Afghanistan, via song, but trek back to the Pinney narrative in a bid to connect somehow. A narrator reads out Pinney’s words as you step over black-and-whites shot with his Leica. Graphic planes and trains leave traces. You try to click on them and go nowhere. You journey into Rough Travel where territory is themed, heading straight for stories about food, sidetracked by stories of filming and photographing. You are enouraged to contribute your own. As you struggle to get a sense of place you at last meet Anna Young and Matthew Newtown, retracing Pinney’s steps with young documentary eyes—standing on the back of a truck (easier to jump off) winding through rocky Afghanistan mountains, waiting for the monsoon in sweltering Assam, gagging on betel and drinking rice beer—kicking up their own dust.